Milton officials looks for path forward on council districts

Milton Town Council is trying to decide whether it should move forward with a proposal to create council districts.

At council’s Feb. 2 meeting, Mayor John Collier said he would come back to council in March with some additional ideas to deliberate on, but he questioned whether council districts are something the town should spend more time on.

“The more I think about it, the more work I see,” he said. “And I’m not sure as a governing body that we’re qualified or have the tools at our disposal to do this work.”

Collier said he shared the concern that if the town went to a district system, there may not be enough candidates to run.

“The more I look at it, I’m getting to the point where I think maybe it's time to re-number the number of people who sit at this table, rather than building more districts,” he said. “Our track record for attracting candidates is not the best to begin with. So if we have to attract two from one particular district and we can’t get them, what do we do?”

Town Manager Kristy Rogers suggested council decide whether it wants to move forward with districts at all, so town staff has some direction.

“If there’s no desire to do that, we might as well take a vote to end the discussion,” she said. “If there is a desire, it would be helpful to have that vote, and then [share] what you expect to come next from the staff. I just don’t want to be wasting staff time and resources or the University of Delaware if you are not going to take the next step.” 

In October, council heard a presentation from John Laznik of the University of Delaware’s Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research, who described the district system as a math problem, with the goal being to try to have each district have an equal number of people. Laznik laid out two suggestions, one for a three-district system and another for a four-district system. 

Councilwoman Randi Meredith said she’s concerned that having districts will narrow the candidate pool so much that candidates run unopposed. 

“It’s important that people be challenged, and I worry that narrowing the candidate pool would make that not feasible,” she said. 

Councilman Robert Gray said he thinks it is inevitable that the town moves to some kind of district system. Council began discussing districts to get ahead of the issue in anticipation of future residential developments that could dramatically change the town’s demographics. Milton currently uses an at-large system where council members can come from anywhere in town. 

Council has discussed using the census as the basis for districting, but Gray suggested using town water data as a way to count residents and determine districts. Councilman Scotty Edler said in his research, there is no districting that has been done any other way than in census blocks. 

“I just don’t see what better system we would have,” he said. 

Collier suggested council table the matter for now and discuss again in March.